Lisa was pacing the rug, but the djinn was lounging at ease on the couch. Lisa stopped on top of an old coffee stain and sucked in a deep, calming breath of cabbagey apartment air. "OK," she said. "I thought about it all night, and here it is: my wish is that I want to be the richest person in the world."

"The richest person in the world?" said the Djinn dubiously. "That's your one wish? That's going to make you happy?"

Lisa was expecting the djinn to try to confuse her, and she stared him down. "It's none of your business whether it makes me happy," she said. "Just do it."

And the djinn did it. And suddenly Lisa was Bill Gates.

Lisa-Bill sat in his office, suddenly much smarter and much, much richer than Lisa had been, and immediately realized her mistake.

The office was simple, not what Lisa would have gotten for herself at all: a large, three-sided desk with a row of flat screen monitors, family pictures, blond furniture. And the Bill Gates body, while trim and well-groomed, felt as wrong on her as somebody else's dirty underwear.

Finding Lisa's awkward computer skills translated into Bill's elegant technological genius, Lisa-Bill pulled up a subscription Web site and with a 90-wpm rattle of the keyboard, searched for his former self. She didn't exist.

Lisa-Bill cried for fifteen minutes. Then he dried his eyes and sat back to think of where he could find another djinn.